About CoverSutra, the Mac App Store and Sanity | Hacker News Reader

About CoverSutra, the Mac App Store and Sanity

sophiestication.com

30 pointsstrandev25 comments

Yuck. For me her explanation just makes the situation worse: 'I forgot what I'd promised, but now that I've been reminded of it, buck up and just spend the $5 to get what I'd told you would be included in your original purchase. I'm not trying to screw anybody over and I'm offended you said I am.' Really?! Shockingly not customer-centric.

Not that this excuses the rude anonymous idiocy against her on Twitter and her blog comments - I never understand why people yell and say ugly things even before asking nicely. Really unpleasant and wrong. But her behavior certainly doesn't make me want to purchase anything she makes in the future, either.

Her response was written entirely from her perspective. Shockingly bad customer service, indeed.

I have no idea why the dev is choosing to take a major hit in her reputation that she clearly worked pretty hard to build through great design and code, for no reason other than "I don't want to spin up a separate build".

And for what? If you're gonna burn through your company's rep, at least get something out of it. Contrast this to what another Indie Mac dev did when confronted with the same situation:

"Free updates to the 1.x product will continue for paid customers of TapeDeck. It means a bit of extra maintenance on my part, but I will do my best to keep my existing customers happy."

I might even understand if she would say something like "It's not worth it to me and I'm not going to do it... Sorry."

But what baffles me is that she has continued to imply that she hasn't done anything wrong, made a point to say that people are overreacting, and even questioned their sanity. Wow. PR nightmare.

I can't tell if it's a PR nightmare or not. A quick look at Twitter shows a ton of people claiming that they're purchasing copies just to support her. Her company is certainly getting lots more press than it has in a while.

Good point. I guess I more accurately meant it would be a PR nightmare for me... I just couldn't feed good about pissing off so many people, even if it did ultimately increase my sales.

Oh definitely. And the (to my eye) overly supportive reaction has most definitely surprised me - my impression was that we expected more from small devs, not less; but if Microsoft, Google, or Apple had made a similar move, I don't imagine it would have been met with a throng rushing to buy the new version to support the company in the face of a few people being inappropriately rude. Will be interesting to see what effect this has on Sophiestication long term.

That's not support, that's Stockholm Syndrome.

Why doesn't she simply offer App Store coupon codes to existing users? Seems like that would solve her "PR" problems, and they expire after their first use so there shouldn't be any worry of piracy or anything like that, as with serial numbers.

As far as I know, you only get 50 of those per release.

Per version, I believe. You have to game the system a little bit for that, but that's what Marco does according to the Build & Analyze podcast, from what I recall.

I can't verify this right now since I don't have anything in the mac app store, but I had heard that promo codes are not working yet.

Source: http://twitter.com/#!/majicDave/status/23220997280768000

Crazy- she could have scored points out of this! Price at $0.99 out of the gate, email the ENTIRE userbase explaining the situation. Say that there is no way to migrate existing users to the App Store, but in appreciation of their support she's pricing at 99 cents for the first week so they can upgrade.

Explicitly state that 'Even though I'll lose a bunch of money by pricing so low during the launch of the App Store, it's worth it to me to maintain the trust of my users'.

Boom. Crisis averted, you lose $5-10k or so on launch sales, but make very, very loyal users out of your existing customers. Cross-sell that email list more aggressively in the future. Money in the bank.

> If I thought of that license text I would have simply declared this new version 3.0.

Ouch. Despite what I think she's trying to claim, this statement shows that she clearly had no intention of keeping the "free upgrades til 3.0" promise.

Kind of a bum deal for her customers.

The tragedy is that it could all have been averted by numbering the 2.5 release as 3.0. From the comments on her original blog post my impression is that most complainers don't seem to understand that version numbers are arbitrarily defined by the developer.

It's not hard to imagine she might have gotten good PR by announcing that v3 is out and, per the promise, a simple paid purchase through the app store.

She kept it. I got a few upgrades since I bought CoverSutra a few years ago. Her error is that the change in distribution and licensing was probably sufficient for 3.0.

RealMac annoyed me one time when I got v3.5 (or whatever it was at the time) in a bundle, but 3.6 was a paid upgrade…because they didn't think there was quite enough to justify bumping to 4.0. 3.6 came out about 4 months after the bundle, IIRC, so it was doubly bad PR.

She has certainly lost my trust. She made a promise to help her business -- possibly impacting competing products like BowTie who did not make the same promise negatively -- and then fails to uphold it. Not only is this a breach of contract with her customers, it undermines our ability to find viable alternative products.

A promise doesn't mean "I'll do it if it's convenient." That people are rewarding her broken promise is just bizarre.

I understand the difficulties of running a small shop, but the right PR move here is to suck it up, apologize to customers, and do what you can to make it right. If that means having to take some time out to spin new builds until you hit version 3.0 then so be it.

Sounds like the only reason to stick to her position is principle; it's not like she isn't going to take a financial hit from this.

The way this was handled certainly has an "ick" factor, but I wonder if it will matter from a pure business perspective in the end. Hell. It may even help. It's got a lot of people talking about her...

Here are some other thoughts/questions:

1) Users have been receiving free upgrades for years, meaning she received no additional revenues from them. I wonder many of the vocal unhappy users would upgrade to the app store version anyway if she just called this 3.0. How "valuable" is the livid segment of her existing customerbase?

2) The app store will allow her to reach new users that don't know or care about the developers. The Mac App Store is a black box where the developer reputation doesn't seem to matter much, unless its reflected in the reviews. Think about buying an iPhone app... Have you ever researched the reputation of a dev before buying a $4.99 iPhone app? My brother would just buy the app and be happy as a clam.

3) She has 70 reviews in the store so far. Only 1 mentions this and gives her 1-star. Many give 5 stars and some talk about how they are happy to pay for this upgrade.

Again, not condoning the behavior... Just thinking out loud.

I think it's pathetic to whinge about having to drop just $5 on an app store version when a lot of users originally got it through a discount bundle such as Macheist. Especially as it will update to any future version (3.0+) for free and the existing app isn't going to expire, as stated in the blog post.

Look at any other company, Apple isn't going to give you a free code to say, Aperture 3 just because you own the pre-MAS serialized version.

"Especially as it will update to any future version (3.0+) for free."

Free upgrades to any future version? Sure.. Let's just hope she don't decide to switch to another publishing platform and ask the users to buy the app again.

People aren't mad because it costs $5, they're mad because she broke a promise.

And if Apple had reneged on a promise that all Aperture 2 users would get Aperture 3 for free, you better believe it would get huge (negative) media coverage.

If Apple had explicitly promised Aperture 3 purchasers free updates until Aperture 4 and then they'd put out Aperture 3.5 with new features only on the App Store (and told people to just get over it because it's too hard to maintain two versions), then the situation would be similar. And people would very rightly be pissed.

maybe it's because I'm getting old and crotchety, or perhaps it's because I didn't get a good night sleep last night (it's stinking hot here and we've no air-con), but my internet today is full of self-entitled whiners.

ffs people, cut the lady some slack. all this fuss over a $5 cover art app!?

Sure, she broke a promise, there doesn't seem much doubt about that, but don't we all? Who here has never broken a $5 promise? Who's never said they'd be home at 6, but didn't get in 'til 6:30? Who's never said they'd meet for coffee, but then couldn't make it?

And no, I don't accept the argument that this is the same as if Apple reneged on an Aperture promise or similar. It's not binary, it's a scale, but $5 is at one end and $100 is a lot further up.

I realise this is an unpopular position, but I just can't stand all this negative attitude all heaped on one person. would you behave like this if she was in the same room as you?

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